The Playlist: Beyoncé and Jay-Z Unite, and 12 More New Songs

During the past few years, DJ Khaled has grown into several new roles: Snapchat celebrity, occasional motion picture scene stealer, singing competition judge, father of the year. Less heralded, though, is his job as host for Jay-Z and Beyoncé collaborations, a position that both boosts his profile and also eases pressure on the superstar couple, so they can give away gifts rather than build houses of their own. “Top Off” is the first song from the forthcoming DJ Khaled album, “Father of Asahd,” and once you swipe away the numbing hook and pseudo-verse from Future, there, plain as day, is an impressive Jay-Z/Beyoncé duet. Jay-Z raps about the injustice of Meek Mill’s incarceration, then suggests he’d kill George Zimmerman “with my own hands.” Not everything is so weighted though: Jay-Z would like to impress you with his watches, and Beyoncé will encourage you to have a good time, but “If they trying to party with the queen, they gonna have to sign a nondisclosure.”

— JON CARAMANICA

“YDTMHTL” stands for “You don’t tell me how to live!” a refrain that young women can shout back at unwanted judgments or advice delivered with “fake concern.” On this first song from an album due in April, “Capture the Flag,” the Baltimore hardcore band War on Women hurtles, stomps, grinds out power chords, squeals feedback and then barrels ahead again through this two-minute primer on unapologetic self-determination, complete with a final blast after a false ending. No wonder a pioneering punk feminist, Kathleen Hanna, joined in.

— JON PARELES

“Nothing but happiness, nothing but joy,” the Malian songwriter Sidi Touré declares in this song celebrating a wedding. And sheer euphoria radiates from a groove that starts with a succinct desert-blues guitar lick, then keeps piling up polyrhythms, foreground and background, until it’s utterly, gloriously head spinning.

— JON PARELES

The British band Shopping comes from the skeletal-repetition school of post-punk, and “Suddenly Gone,” from its album “The Official Body,” is constructed from a small handful of terse single-note guitar lines and bass riffs behind Rachel Aggs brusquely chanting a critique of capitalism: “When will you recognize a single consequence/or are you waiting until everything’s gone?” The wild card, rare in this very austere genre, is a second, overdubbed drum kit; against a dutiful steady wallop, its rumbles and crashes incite some anarchy.

— JON PARELES

Two songs from the forthcoming Rae Sremmurd triple album, one from each member. But rather than propose new stand-alone identities, these songs end up reinforcing — leaning on, really — the component parts that when combined, have made Rae Sremmurd one of hip-hop’s most innovative acts. (It also released “Powerglide,” a duo song featuring Juicy J.) “Hurt to Look” by Swae Lee is slow-burn minimal disco, delivered casually. It’s sharp but only simmers lightly without ever cooking the whole way through. What it needs is an anchor. What it needs is Slim Jxmmi, whose brawny “Brxnks Truck” is full of manic energy.

— JON CARAMANICA

The pianist Keith Jarrett hasn’t performed with his longtime trio in many years, but Friday he released “After the Fall,” a collection of 12 jazz classics recorded in concert 20 years ago. This is a straight-ahead trio for the ages, fed by a tension between Jarrett’s resolute, lapidary touch and the collective’s shape-shifting, onward drive. On “Bouncin’ With Bud,” the tuneful Bud Powell classic, Jack DeJohnette maintains a openhanded clatter on the drums, while Jarrett revels in the tune’s major-key buoyancy. Stating the melody, he rounds off some of Powell’s punctuation marks and, on his extended solo, verges toward the seraphic.

— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

“Run” follows a bad breakup, enfolded by lies and contradictions and divided loyalties among friends. “Just don’t kick me when I’m down,” sings the woman who calls herself pronoun, singing both alone and multitracked. “You’re just another lost and found.” The track is stolid three-chord rock, building and pounding and gleaming, subsiding and building again. And the situation is a pre-emptive defense. Pronoun knows full well that, “You’re gonna run.”

— JON PARELES

There are rappers who write words and then hope to put them to a melody, and then there is Valee, who is melody first, cadence second, imaginative and sometimes odd lyrics third (but never an afterthought). “Miami” is an older song of his, but now that he’s signed to GOOD Music, it’s being revived for his major-label debut EP, “GOOD Job, You Found Me.” On this remix, he even nudges Pusha T, he of the irreducible snarl, toward a stop-start flow that sounds like boasts being delivered backward.

— JON CARAMANICA

The only album likely to be released internationally this year with lyrics in Cornish — an ancient, vanishing British language — is “Le Kov” by the Welsh singer and songwriter Gwenno. The album is a grab-bag of styles, often retro, but “Herdhya” sets a whispery, Celtic-tinged vocal to eerie electronica, full of time-reversed chords and echoey piano tones. As the lyrics examine post-Brexit isolation, the music posits a very uncertain future.

— JON PARELES

A U.K. rap remix of “Look Alive” that takes the interaction on the original by the Memphis local eccentric BlocBoy JB and the global superstar Drake as a framework. In this version, the loose energy comes from Suspect, who yelp-raps with anxious fury, while the grime superstar Skepta provides the grounded menace: “Every day these french fries/talking like they supersize.”

— JON CARAMANICA

Humor faces down desolation in “Nobody’s Home” from “Call Me Lucky,” an existential ramble from the latest album by the sage, scratchy-voiced, blues-rooted, 73-year-old songwriter Chris Smither: “Everybody wants to text me ‘cause they ain’t got nothing to say,” he notes. He recorded two versions, as he did with half a dozen of the album’s songs; one’s a ragtimey cackle, while the other is slower and more pensive, revealing a little more darkness.

— JON PARELES

Anthony Braxton has always seen his reconstituted, spatial music as a part of a wide tradition, lacing free improvisation into new compositional models. The jazz world has never known quite what to do with it all. But Braxton, an inclusive thinker and far-ranging saxophonist, has returned to classic jazz repertoire at various points. His latest release, “Sextet (Parker) 1993,” is a six-CD set collecting live performances of tunes associated with Charlie Parker, the bebop progenitor. On many of these tracks, Braxton’s sextet — including the drummer Pheeroan akLaff and the pianist Misha Mengelberg — hews to a cinched swing feel, letting its avant-garde linguistics slip in through the cracks. But here and there things break wide open. Parker’s “Scrapple From the Apple” loses its steady pulse, becoming an immersion in overtones and soupy interplay, especially between Braxton’s contrabass clarinet and the sighing, slippery bass of Joe Fonda.

— GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO